The Reformation, as is known, holds essentially to having a tradition--a rise and visible continuation, reaching back to the earlier ages. Behold them, then, these prophets and forerunners of the "word of life:" Here, Peter Waldo, Arnold of Brescia, Wickliffe, John Huss; there, Abelard, the bold metaphysician, the merciless dialectician, the same whom St. Bernard accuses of sacrificing faith to reason, and of destroying, by his explications, the essence of the mysteries; [Footnote 14] next, by his side, Savonarola and Tauler, the spiritual sons of the canonized monk of the thirteenth century, (St. Dominic,) to whose memory classic Protestantism never fails to attach the founding of the Inquisition, with all its attendant train of horrors: Tauler, of whom they desire to make one of the precursors of the new exegesis of the Scriptures; and Savonarola, whose animated and fiery gesture recalls at once the popular tribune, the Florentine republican chief, and the head-strong opposer of the church's hierarchical authority. [Footnote 14: St. Bernard, letters 188th and 189th.] Following upon these, come next in order all those other great geniuses of the human race, more numerous and prolific than ever in an age which justly calls itself the age of _renewal_, (_de la Renaissance_,) and when a thousand favoring circumstances had imparted mighty impulse to the human mind; and they all proceed to arrange themselves in a most harmonious manner around that renovation of Christianity and the church, which is, as it were, (in the picture,) the heart and the vital principle of all the movements of the era. Princes, warriors, statesmen, savants, artists, scholars, jurists, poets, critics, inventors--all have their place in this grand composition. {58} In the train of the haughty Elizabeth of England, but marching at some distance from that pitiless reformer, as if they desired to leave place for the gory shade of the unfortunate Mary Stuart, "Queen of Scots," appear Thomas Cranmer, More, Burleigh, Essex, Drake, and other gentlemen who represent the English Church. Another group brings together Albert of Brandenburg, William of Orange, Barnevelt, and, at the end, Gustavus Adolphus, evoked a century in advance, it is true, but nevertheless consecrated by his bold deeds of arms and his premature death as a hero--I was about to say as a saint--of the Protestant Church militant. To warriors and statesmen the painter has given only a secondary place, in a work chiefly designed to glorify intellectual power; and, after the apostles of the Reformation, the honors of this grand piece of canvas are meted out to savants, scholars, and artists.